


Takes Its Course

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [16]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Addiction, Bonding, Drug Withdrawal, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-11 05:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18424005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: After escaping from imprisonment, Danny goes through drug withdrawals; Ward is along for the ride, and forced to deal with certain aspects of his past.





	Takes Its Course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sovay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/gifts).



> Many thanks to Edonohana and Sheron for beta help, and to Sovay for the prompt/idea!

It was typical, Ward thought. Trust Danny Rand to go missing for a week only to finally turn up in the middle of rescuing _himself_ , with an unsurprising amount of property destruction in his wake.

After a week of desperately looking for Danny, he found him, in the end, by following the flames to a burning warehouse on the seedier end of the Taipei dockside. Ward had gone in at dusk with a black-market rifle over his shoulder and an equally illicit pistol shoved in the waistband of his jeans, all of it covered with Danny's stupid long coat that was drowning him in sweat in the early autumn heat. And then, rather than ending up in the starring role of a daring rescue, he almost literally ran into Danny at one of the warehouse's side doors, stumbling out with his shirt in rags and a wild look in his eyes.

"Danny," Ward snapped, grabbing him by the arms, and Danny staggered to a stop and stared at Ward like he'd never seen him before. His hair was a sweaty mess, and he was splattered with blood that Ward really hoped wasn't his. 

"Danny," Ward said again, more gently, and gave him a little shake, but what he'd taken at first for shock wasn't wearing off, and he realized there was a lot more wrong: Danny's pupils were blown black, his skin hot to the touch. When Ward gave him a fast pat-down for critical bleeding or broken bones, he found bruises and needle tracks under the shredded remains of Danny's shirt.

"What happened in there?" Ward asked, but Danny just shook his head and leaned shivering against him. Ward gave it approximately a half second of thought and then dropped his illegal rifle over the side of the dock into the water (better than running the risk of being caught with it), wrapped the duster around Danny, and got him out of there.

 

***

 

He snagged a taxi as soon as he managed to get away from the flaming warehouse and gave the driver the name of a night market on the other side of the city; it wasn't a destination so much as an excuse to give him time to think. In the backseat, Danny leaned against him with his heart thumping away like explosions and his face turned into Ward's shoulder. He smelled like smoke and the copper tang of blood and, underneath it, something sweetish and sickly. 

For a self-indulgent minute or two, Ward just let himself sit there and exist in the moment, with his shoulder pressed against Danny's: Danny, who was here and alive and in reasonably good shape, all things considered -- if not in perfect shape, then at least not the realization of Ward's nightmares during this week of searching and worry. Ward wanted to ask him what the fuck _happened,_ if Colleen was right and it was a rogue faction of the Hand, where he'd been, what they'd _done_ ... But Danny was in no condition to answer, and Ward wasn't about to ask questions with the driver in earshot, even in English; half the people in this city, at least the ones that dealt with the public, spoke at least a little of it. He couldn't even call Colleen and let her know their last lead had paid off, not until he found somewhere to go to ground.

And he didn't know where to go. There _was_ nowhere safe if the Hand was looking for them. His first thought was a hospital, which Danny clearly needed, and Ward had his mouth open to try to see if he could get the point across to the driver with the few words of Mandarin he knew, when he shut his mouth again and then muttered a heartfelt, " _Fuck."_

Because taking Danny to a hospital was the one thing he couldn't do. Anyone looking for them would look there first. No hospitals. No doctors. They had to disappear.

With that in mind, he had the driver let them out in the shopping district he'd requested, paying in cash. They would be memorable, but there was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was try to lay down a confusing trail. 

Danny swayed and leaned against him, stumbling, while Ward guided him through a press of tourists and bar-crawlers. For once it worked in their favor that this town never really slowed down, even at night; at least they had a crowd to disappear into. They could pass for a couple of drunken tourists as long as no one looked too closely. Ward bought a baseball cap at one stall, wildly overpaying, and jammed it down over Danny's memorable head of sweat-soaked blond curls.

They made it through the night market onto a quieter street, and Ward flagged down another cab and pulled up Google Maps and pointed to -- fuck, _he_ didn't know; a park would do, so he pointed at it. "Not open," the driver said, but Ward pointed emphatically, and then they were off again, adding another jink to the trail for their pursuers. In the backseat, Danny fisted a hand in Ward's shirt, just holding onto him, breathing harshly.

Ward wanted to give up on this stupid runaround and take him to a hospital. He wanted to get somewhere quiet, where he could call Colleen and Misty. He didn't want to be doing this alone. 

_We don't always get what we want, though, do we?_

The driver let them off at the darkened park with its locked gates. Enough of this, Ward thought. If they weren't being followed now, they had some breathing room. He eased Danny down to sit on the curb, and looked up hotels while Danny rested his head in his hands.

Quietly and hoarsely, Danny said, "Ward?"

Ward rested a hand lightly on the back of Danny's neck while scrolling through hotel options with his other hand. Ideally somewhere close enough to walk to ... "I'm here."

Danny caught a shuddering breath, and then he said softly, "Where are we?"

"The wilds of Taipei," Ward said, squeezing the sweat-sticky back of Danny's neck, and Danny gave a little huff of a laugh. "No, seriously, I've managed to land us in suburbia, I think. There's a convenience store a little ways down the street, we can get you something to drink, and then one more cab ride and we can stop for awhile, okay?"

"Okay," was the meek response, and when Ward got up, Danny came with him. The passivity worried him more than anything else, but all he could do was roll with it for now. There wasn't really a choice.

"Who were those guys?" Ward asked quietly as they started toward the lights of a 7-Eleven down the block. "Colleen thought it was a side branch of the Hand, maybe some of Bakuto's old pupils. Is that who they were?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I think so." Danny took a shaky breath. "I don't know, it's all so confusing. I don't even know if this is real. I think it's real?"

That was a gut-punch. "It's real," Ward said. He had one arm around Danny, keeping him from falling over; now he squeezed tighter, fingers wrapped around Danny's forearm. "It's real, this is real, you got that?"

"I don't think I would have hallucinated this hat," Danny said with something like a laugh, reaching up to touch it. There were cartoon kittens on it, and a pompom on top. Ward hadn't been looking closely when he'd snatched it off the rack.

"I did what I could with what I had. You look adorable." Ward hesitated. "What'd they give you; do you know?"

"Drugs," Danny said, and it was Ward's turn to make a noise, a little involuntary choked-off laugh. Danny actually smiled at that. "I know," he said, sounding a little more like himself. "But I really don't know. A lot of stuff, drugs on top of drugs ..." He shivered against Ward, who patted his arm, not sure what else to do. "They were trying to open the channel to the Iron Fist," he added after a moment.

"Did they? Is that how you got away?"

Danny shook his head. "No. It's dark. Dead. Like always. They --" He broke off, coughing, a dry hacking cough. Ward, alarmed, stopped and held onto a fistful of the duster until Danny got his breath back. "Fighting between themselves," Danny finished weakly, his head bowed. "Other guys, I don't know. Two groups, I think."

"Did they kill each other off, or are they still looking for us?"

"I don't know. Don't remember. Ward, I _really_ don't feel good."

"Just sit," Ward told him, and deposited him against the wall outside the 7-Eleven. He paused to make sure his shirt was covering the pistol tucked into his waistband before going inside.

The initial discovery that 7-Eleven was ubiquitous across Asia had thrown him for a loop. McDonald's at least he'd expected. Seeing the cheery 7-Eleven logo that he associated with late-night freeway stops in Ohio side by side with noodle stands and towering neon signs in Chinese was like being transported into another dimension.

But that was nothing compared to the experience of stepping _inside_ the things. Where he'd expected racks of clip-on sunglasses and stale packages of Ring Dings, he found café tables, baked goods, refrigerated coolers of salads and bento boxes; instead of sleep-dazed tourists and a bored-looking clerk, there were (at most hours) brunching millennials and grazing students.

In the middle of the night, in the relative boondocks of Taipei's outskirts, this one was deserted. He grabbed a can of cold tea for Danny, dithered over tourist caps to replace the more conspicuous one and then decided it didn't matter. On the sidewalk outside, he fed Danny sips of the tea and called an Uber.

 

***

 

By this point in their round-the-world road trip of self-discovery and whatever-the-fuck, Danny had managed to infuse just enough Mandarin into Ward's vocabulary that he could manage the basics of a few common social interactions (getting a taxi, ordering food, apologizing for stepping on someone's foot). Acquiring a hotel room was not one of those things, but the desk clerk turned out to speak adequate English and anyway, it wasn't like there were a lot of other reasons why people wandered into hotels.

Ward decided this would be an excellent opportunity to use one of their handful of fake identities. They didn't have any that would stand up to international travel or even to a cursory police check, but between Ward's caution and paranoia, and Danny's talent for pissing off powerful people, they had concluded it was prudent to take the trouble of acquiring several credit cards and forged IDs in different names. So "Wendell Crane", American businessman, reserved a hotel suite for a week and then snuck around the corner to retrieve a staggering, dazed Danny from where he'd left him in a doorway, and hustled him into the hotel and, as quickly as possible, into the elevator.

"Home sweet home," Ward said, keying them into their room. Danny gave a little sigh and started to fold up _right there_ on the carpet. "No, dammit --" Ward threw the deadbolt and chain, stripped the coat off Danny and left it in a heap by the door while he steered Danny into the bathroom.

Danny let Ward sit him on the edge of the bathtub, where he folded gently against the wall. It was Ward's first opportunity to get a look at him under good, bright light. He looked like absolute shit -- pale and ashy, dark circles under his eyes, bruises both fresh and faded -- but he also didn't look like he was bleeding from anywhere vital or about to drop dead of anything obvious. 

Ward poured a glass of water and got him to take it. Danny held it clumsily in both hands, sipping occasionally while Ward crouched down to undo the laces on Danny's sneakers.

"Whatcha doin'?" Danny asked faintly.

"Putting you in the shower, because you really need it."

"Mmmm. Okay."

Ward ran the water until it was warm but not too hot, and then took the water glass away. "You think you can take things from here and manage not to drown for five minutes?" he asked, and poked Danny's arm until he got a response out of him.

"Uh-huh. Sure. Stoppit."

After that dubious reassurance, he left Danny sitting on the edge of the bathtub and went back out to the suite's main room. He left the bathroom door open a crack in case things went sideways in there, checked out the window for police or suspicious-looking cars before drawing the blinds, and laid the gun in easy reach on the table. Then he sat on the couch and put his head in his hands and indulged in a minute or two of a mini freakout. After that, he called Colleen.

"Oh, thank God, thank _God_." Colleen's relief came through even with the static and lousy connection that made it sound like she was speaking from the bottom of a barrel. "He really was in Taipei, then? I didn't think -- I mean, that was the long shot, Nepal was the one we were confident of." 

"I know. Go figure." Which was why she was there and he was here; but he'd known that, he hadn't argued, knowing he was much more useful in an urban area than running around in the mountains. 

"Are you still in Taiwan?" she asked.

"For now. Hotel's booked for a week." He tilted his head, listening to the sound of the shower running in the bathroom, and nothing else. Danny better not be passed out in there. "You still in -- where _are_ you? Kathmandu?"

"The vicinity, anyway," Colleen said. "How _is_ he?"

"Okay, I guess. Out of it. Tired. He's -- They tried to drug the Iron Fist back into him." He took a breath; this was one of those points when he didn't even _know_ what a better person than him would have done: lied to her and told her Danny was totally fine? Told the whole truth? He went with that one, or at least a curated, slightly-less-alarming version of it. "I assume he's mostly okay, but he probably should be in a hospital to be on the safe side. I just can't take him to one because of the fucking Hand or whoever. I don't even know what the hell they gave him."

"Ward. How bad is it?"

"I don't know," Ward said. So much for being a good person. "I just don't know. He's coming out of it, I mean, he knows me, he knows where he is, but ... I don't know."

There was a pause. Static crackled down the line. He wondered if they'd been cut off, but then -- " _Damn_ it," Colleen said. "Damn it. I need to talk to Misty. Hold on."

He sat on the arm of the couch and listened to voices too indistinct to make out: the tense cadence of Colleen's voice, the calmer rise and fall of Misty's. From the bathroom, the sound of the shower and nothing else. He was just about to get up and check on Danny when Colleen came back on. "Ward?"

"Here." And he even felt calmer, somewhat. In some weird way, listening to them had helped: a touchstone of sorts, down there at the end of the line in another time zone.

"Ward, I want to get back there, you don't know how much I want to get back there, but Misty and I --" She took a breath. Ward could hear Misty saying something in the background. "These guys are going to try again. There's no way they won't. The only way we can keep them off your back is by making enough of a problem for them here that they can't make a problem for you there."

Ward closed his eyes. "It's the Hand, isn't it?" And he tried not to see white handprints on glass -- _wasn't_ going to think about Harold, or the fear he'd lived under for twelve years.

"More like the Hand once removed, but yes. At least two factions. Do you want the details?"

"Not really." The burning warehouse, the blood on Danny -- "It looked like they might have some kind of turf war going here. I think Danny used it as cover to escape, or possibly instigated it. Hard to tell."

Colleen huffed something that might have been an exasperated snort or a laugh. "Can I talk to him?"

"He's in the shower right now. He really needed one. I'll have him call as soon as he's feeling up to it, okay?"

She made an acknowledging sound. He could almost hear her wrestling with her dilemma.

"He's going to be okay without you," he said, forcing the words past the part of him that just wanted her to get back here, _now_ , and deal with this so he didn't have to. But the thing was, he _did_ get it, not just the necessity of splitting the group right now, but also their tilting-at-windmills Gryffindor mentality, which probably meant he was spending way too much time around Danny. "Look, you _know_ me; you know I wouldn't lie about that. He'd be happy to have you here, but he's not going to keel over without immediate healing or anything. Go indulge in some cathartic ninja-stabbing and then get back here and take a shift on brow-mopping duty."

She let out another of those indignant little huff-laughs. "Ward --" she began, and then paused, listening to Misty in the background. "Yes, I'm coming. Ward ... thank you."

Her gratitude was harder to deal with than her scorn. "He handled most of the escape on his own. I just showed up in time to drag his skinny carcass out of the mess he created before the cops showed up."

There was another of those soft huff-laughs. "Have him call me when he can. Misty says stay out of trouble."

And she hung up.

Ward dragged his hand over his face, checked the locks, and then went into the bathroom. He found Danny sitting in the bathtub, sodden clothes and all, crumpled against the wall. When Ward leaned a knee on the edge of the tub and looked down at him with a strange mix of affection and pity twisting his stomach, Danny blinked up at him with his face and hair and lashes frosted with water droplets. "Oh, hi," he said faintly.

"Right," Ward said with a sigh, shutting off the shower. "Colleen says hi, by the way. Are you clean enough for now?"

"Mmm."

Still high as a kite, but not really enjoying the trip much, from what Ward could tell. There were complimentary bathrobes in one of the closets and Ward helped Danny strip out of his soaked clothes and get into the soft, dry robe. 

He wished he dared call a doctor, but that was right up there with taking Danny to a hospital on the seriously-not-a-good-idea list. As long as they could spent a few days laying low, not doing anything to call attention to themselves, they had a very good chance of going completely unnoticed. In a metropolitan area of seven million people, even one where white Americans were relatively rare, they could vanish.

As long as they didn't do anything to catch anyone's attention. 

Like, say, fetching a doctor for a house call to a hotel.

And that probably also applied to having things delivered. He could likely get away with basic room service, but getting one of the bellboys to go pick up medical supplies for him ... no. And they _would_ need things, especially if Danny ended up having a hard time going off the drugs that the Hand had been pumping him full of for a week.

He steered Danny into one of the bedrooms and helped him down to the bed.

"Where are the guns?" Danny asked suddenly, bouncing back up like a Jack-in-the-box.

He didn't need to ask which guns; there was only one set of guns Danny could possibly mean. "With Colleen and Misty in Nepal."

"Oh."

"Go to sleep," Ward told him, pushing him back down. "I gotta go out for an hour or two. You're gonna stay here. Got it?"

Danny mumbled something into his arm.

"Hey." Ward shook his shoulder until Danny roused enough to look at him blearily. "I'm going out, hear me? Don't open the door if anyone knocks, even if it's the hotel staff. Don't go anywhere. Don't answer the phone. I've got my phone --" He hesitated; Danny's phone hadn't been on him when Ward got him back. "Okay, listen, I'll write the number down and leave it by the room phone. Call me if anything happens. You got that? Danny?"

Danny had curled up into a ball again, but Ward's continued efforts at shaking him finally produced a mumbled, "Yes, _Mom."_

Ward had to suppress a grin. If Danny could manage to be a petulant little jerk, he was probably going to be okay.

Eventually.

 

***

 

By now it was after midnight and the streets had emptied out. Ward tried not to feel too panicked about leaving Danny alone with the Hand on the hunt (Colleen, he was sure, would _not_ approve, but he couldn't see that he had a choice) and compiled an ever-lengthening mental list of everything he was going to need. This involved thinking a little too much about a time in his life he tended to think about as little as possible, but he forced himself to _just man up already_ and try to come up with what _he_ would have wanted if he'd managed to go through detox in something vaguely like a supportive environment instead of sabotaging himself at every turn.

There was no damn way to know _what_ they gave Danny, or what kind of symptoms he might have, or whether it was going to be life-threatening. So he needed to cover every base he could possibly think of.

They were going to need simple, easy-to-eat foods that could be heated in the room's microwave and stored in its mini-fridge. Ward didn't dare go back to their previous hotel to grab their luggage, not with the risk that the hotel was staked out by now, so at least one change of clothes would be a good idea. Actually, make that several changes of clothes, if he could find somewhere to buy it -- soft things, easy to put on and take off. And a veritable pharmacy of over-the-counter drugs: painkillers, vitamins, anti-nausea and anti-diarrheal meds, sleeping pills -- probably something for the goddamn _itching_ that he remembered all too well ... and what the hell, maybe a portable defibrillator or adrenaline or something like that if he could get his hands on it over-the-counter here; he planned to stock up on everything he could possibly need for holing up with someone who'd been drugged nonstop for a week.

He hadn't really thought about not being able to read the labels until he found himself in a 24-hour drugstore, confronted with shelves of incomprehensible-to-him boxes and bottles. The only Chinese characters he knew were the ones Danny had taught him for bathrooms and train stations. He tried to pick the ones that had dual Chinese-English labeling when he could find them, otherwise simply attempting to guess based on what the packaging looked like, and all too aware of time ticking down, time the Hand could be using to track them -- time to find Danny helpless at the hotel, or corner Ward in the store ...

In frustration, he thought about sweeping an arm down the shelf and swiping every last goddamn bottle into his basket. Danny could sort it out back at the hotel. At least cost was no object.

A querulous voice next to him asked him a question.

Ward almost jumped out of his skin and turned to look at the elderly woman gripping a basket and squinting up at him through thick glasses. For a horrified moment he wondered if she could possibly be with the Hand, but she looked too friendly and not nearly terrifying enough.

"Whatever you're asking me about, I don't know where it is," he snapped, shock turning to anger. "I don't even know how to buy goddamn Tylenol around here."

Undaunted by his annoyance, she pointed to the shelf, pointed to his basket, and went through a complicated series of pantomime gestures, and it slowly dawned on Ward that she was asking him what he was looking for.

Probably. Maybe she was asking him where the bathroom was. He decided to assume good faith and go for it.

"Uh ... I have a friend who's sick. Sick? I need -- hmm --"

What followed was about twenty minutes of vigorous, occasionally slightly embarrassing pantomiming, while his new friend picked out bottles for him off the shelves. He had no idea what she thought was actually going on, but he made her laugh more than once, and even if she was only some random stranger in a drugstore in another country, he felt a little less dismal, a little less alone and scared.

And he did at least remember how to say thank you, more or less; this was one Danny had attempted to drill into him. "Xiè xiè," he told her. "Tai xiè xiè ní." She beamed at him.

He was about 99% sure she wasn't Hand, but he still made sure she left before he did, and he took a circuitous route in search of another chain convenience store to get the rest of what he needed.

 

***

 

"Danny?" he said as he let himself into the room, laden with bags.

There was a moment's panic when he found the suite's second bedroom empty, the covers rucked to the side. The bathroom door was shut, a stripe of light showing at the bottom. Ward tapped on the door. "Danny? You alive in there?"

"Go away," was the hoarse, irritated answer. 

Mobile and cranky: a promising combination. Ward started putting things away. 

Danny wobbled out of the bathroom in the middle of that, looking like he might have taken another shower; his hair was a damp mop, and he huddled in the bathrobe, eyes red, looking exhausted and miserable. Still, he seemed to be coming back to himself somewhat. He mustered up a smile and a spark of amused curiosity for the bottles and bags scattered across the table. "What'd you do, buy the entire pharmacy?"

"With the help of a local guide," Ward said, deadpan. "Want something to eat?"

Danny made a face. "Not really. I just kinda want to ..." He trailed off. "I don't know. Sleep. Or something. No, I don't want to sleep. I don't know."

"Let me guess," Ward said without looking up from arranging the contents of his home pharmacy. "You're restless. Itchy. Distracted. Everything's too bright and loud. You just want to move but everything hurts when you do."

"Uh ... yeah." 

It sucked being right. And it didn't change anything. "You still gotta eat. I bet they didn't feed you much in that place, did they?"

"I don't want anything," Danny repeated.

Stubborn to the last. "At least stay hydrated. Here." Ward held up a Gatorade, although he knew the reaction he was going to get.

And he wasn't wrong. Danny rallied enough to say, "My body is a temple. I'm not putting that in it."

"Fine," Ward said, and tucked it into the mini-fridge, carefully not saying _I bet you'll want it later._ "Tea it is, then."

Their room had a hot-water kettle (Danny perked up somewhat at this) so Ward turned him loose to make tea while he got out the takeout containers of beef noodle soup he'd picked up on the way back. Danny continued to refuse food, took two sips of tea, and then zoned out at the table, staring at the wall.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather be in bed?"

"Not really." Danny jumped up, swayed a little, and went to the window. He pulled back the blinds and looked down at the street. "You're sure they didn't see where we went?"

"They didn't," Ward said with more conviction than he felt. "You wanna talk about what happened in, um ... in there?"

"No," Danny said, staring out the window. "Where are the guns?"

Nervousness snaked through Ward's gut. "With Colleen. You asked me that already."

"Oh," Danny said.

"Speaking of which, Colleen wanted you to call when you were up. If you feel up to it." Ward held up his phone and waggled it at him.

Danny looked a little happier and took the phone off to the bedroom. "Hey, Colleen," Ward heard him say, and went and closed the bedroom door to give them some privacy.

He mechanically swallowed a few more spoonfuls of the cooling soup, but finally acknowledged that he wasn't hungry and put both containers in the room's small fridge. Danny's voice was a staccato murmur from the bedroom. Ward sank down on the couch, tipped his head back and tried to blank his mind and not think about things.

His mind was, as usual, uncooperative. Maybe he should have Danny teach him to meditate.

He'd nursed Joy through bouts of flu. Hell, during those last few months when Dad was dying of cancer, there was no avoiding an up-close and personal look at the most intimate physical details of dealing with illness. He wasn't really bothered by messiness.

He just wished this wasn't ... what it was.

Ward realized that he was dragging his fingertips across his arms, as if he could erase the crawling feeling that way. He shuddered and got up and went to look out the window, watch occasional traffic passing in the street. It was going to be morning soon. They'd made it through the night.

He went into the bedroom a little later, when things got quiet, to find Danny asleep on top of the covers with the phone in his slack hand. Ward took the phone, found out that Colleen had hung up, and draped a blanket over him before going back out to the suite's common room and using his phone to look up the withdrawal symptoms for everything he could think of that Danny might have plausibly been given. 

Not that Google had a handy section on "ninja cultist drugs for channeling magic dragon powers." All he could guess, in the end, was that the options were too broad to determine without more data.

He just hoped, and hoped desperately, that Danny wasn't going to have to detox from anything that would be terribly dangerous to stop taking suddenly.

 

***

 

Ward woke some indeterminate time later when a crash startled him out of hazy, unpleasant dreams. He sat up abruptly and then slowly figured out that a) he'd fallen asleep on the couch, and b) the crash was the bathroom door slamming. There was sunlight slanting into the room. Late morning, he figured, or maybe early afternoon.

He reheated some of the leftover soup. When Danny eventually, a long time later, came out of the bathroom looking like twelve shades of warmed-over death, Ward shoved the bowl at him.

"Don't want it," Danny said shortly. He sat down at the table and dropped his head wearily onto his arms.

"Did you get some sleep?"

"I slept," Danny said into his arm. "Some."

"How are you feeling?"

"Can we not do this?"

Ward picked out a handful of bottles from the portable pharmacy and shoved them across the table at him. He got Danny to have a few sips of the broth, but Danny refused to stay still; he wandered all over the room, driving Ward to the edge of distraction.

"I never thought I'd say this, but can't you meditate or something?"

"I can't concentrate." Danny scraped his fingernails down his arms. Ward looked away, and didn't do the same by an effort of will.

 

***

 

That was a long day, followed by a long night. Danny slept some, spent a lot of time in the bathroom, tried watching TV he didn't have the attention span for, and Ward played solitaire with a pack of cards he got from one of the bellboys when he went downstairs to pick up (yet another) clean bathrobe for Danny from Housekeeping. 

And wished he was somewhere else, anywhere else.

Because he remembered, oh God, did he remember. Wanting to sleep but being unable to; the cored-out-beneath-the-surface hollowness he could feel all over again every time he looked at Danny and saw the way Danny's skin lay loose over his frame, the shadows of old bruises where Danny's bones seemed to press too close to the surface.

He had never thought of himself as an addict, back in those days. It was only that he'd had no reason to stop. There was nothing waiting on the other side except Harold; the world was made of blades, and drugs and alcohol were the things that blunted the world's steel to, if not true softness, then at least to kinder blunt edges that left bruises but didn't sever an artery and leave his life's blood all over the street.

_Better watch the pity party there, Meachum ...._

But now there _was_ an "after," there was something to come back to. And the unfair part was the way he kept slamming into the cold reality he'd heard about in all those endless NA and AA meetings, that there was no such thing as an _ex_ addict. Addiction was forever; you just made the choice, over and over again, not to pick it up again. 

He had pushed that idea away as vehemently as he'd pushed away the idea that he was an addict at all, once upon a time. That part of his life was in the past. He could walk away from it. He'd _tried_ to do all of it right, damn it; he'd gone to the meetings, he'd done the steps, he'd stood up in front of all those people and told them the truth. 

There was supposed to be an "after," and it wasn't this: nerves scraped raw, the ghost of a half-remembered cold sweat shivering across him as he watched Danny pacing the room.

"Go to bed, for God's sake. Or do katas or _something._ "

"Why don't _you_ go to bed?" Danny countered.

"Just sit down, you're driving me nuts."

"Don't," Danny snapped.

Ward tossed the cards down. "Don't what?"

"Don't do that -- thing. That you do."

"Christ," Ward said, disgusted with both of them right now. "If you don't sit down for five minutes, I'm going to murder you."

" _That_ thing! That thing where you're not the boss of me, Ward."

Ward wished he had a drink. He let himself indulge in about five seconds of thinking about the cold glass in his hand, the burn of the alcohol on his tongue, the warm buzz taking the edge off the world. Then he got up and reached for Danny with the intention of getting him to _sit the fuck down._

Danny glided out of the way, graceful and fast even in the condition he was in. "Don't touch me."

"Fine," Ward said, holding up his hands. "Just ... sit over here and play cards with me."

"I don't want to."

"Or -- God --" Why was nothing ever _easy?_ He thought about trying to get Danny to resume their sparring lessons, teach him a new move or something, but as tense and irritable as they both were right now, they'd probably end up kicking the shit out of each other. It might be cathartic, but Danny might also break his neck by accident. 

He grabbed a magazine from the TV stand, a guide to local attractions that he couldn't read because the damn thing was in Mandarin, and tore a page out. "C'mere," Ward said. "Remember in that hostel in, where the hell was that? Tibet? Wherever it was, where we were holed up for two days while that blizzard went on with the wind that never stopped screaming, and I was climbing the walls and you showed me how to do origami, or -- I can't remember the Chinese word --"

"Zhézhǐ," Danny said, unwinding a little. "That was in Bhutan."

"Yeah. You said you'd show me more folds. C'mere and let's see if I remember how to make a boat."

He didn't, as it turned out, but he fiddled with it in increasing frustration until Danny got exasperated and took it away from him and folded it. Ward wordlessly tore out more pages and held them out. They sat on the floor and worked together on folding a miniature flotilla and set them adrift on the carpet. Danny tore magazine pages into quarters and made a little animal for each boat: a bunny, a crane, a ... blob ...

"It's a sheep, Ward."

"Whatever. I think you did that one wrong."

"It's a sheep. They _are_ blobs." Danny gave him a quick smile, a flash of his normal sunny demeanor showing through the exhaustion and misery. "Ward --"

"If you apologize, I'm making you eat that sheep. Show me how to make a crane."

They worked on paper folding until Danny was starting to droop. "Sleep," Ward said, and Danny rolled his eyes and kicked Ward lightly in the knee with his bare foot and wandered off to the bedroom.

Sleep ... should have sounded better than it did. The paper folding might have settled Danny down, but Ward was still keyed up and tense.

And a drink still sounded great. It would relax him. Just enough to sack out for a few hours.

He could handle it, he thought. Just one drink.

"Fuck this," he muttered, and cleaned out the minibar, gathered up all the little bottles and took them to the bathroom.

He hated having to do this. It didn't normally bother him, being around alcohol. It was a psychological crutch of sorts -- he was willing to admit that much -- but not, he was fairly sure, a physical addiction. He didn't mind ordering water in bars, and he didn't usually feel attracted to the contents of the minibar in their hotels.

Usually.

Dumping it down the sink felt like a failure of willpower. He shouldn't have had to do this. He hated it, and he hated even more how the sharp smell of Scotch and whiskey and the clear, vodka-looking kaoliang made something at the back of his throat ache and tighten with need.

"What are you ... oh." Danny's voice: Danny, wan and scruffy and still not asleep, leaning on the doorframe. "Are you -- is that -- because of me?"

"It's not because of you." He dumped the last of them and dropped the bottle with a clink into the trash on top of the others. "I thought you were going to bed."

"I still can't sleep."

"You need something in here?"

"No, I just heard you. I guess." Danny tucked his hands into the sleeves of the robe. It looked too big on him; he was like a ghost of Danny, stripped of the brightness and all-around obnoxious cheerfulness that always made him seem to be a little more _there_ than most people. "Are you ... okay?"

It was hilarious, Danny asking _him_ that when Danny looked like walking death. "Yeah," Ward said, but Danny was still looking at him, open and almost hopeful. And it made him think about that night months ago at the dojo, when Danny had lost the Iron Fist, and the only thing that had managed to ease the lost, hurt look on Danny's face was Ward being open about his own damage. "I mean ... I will be. Mostly okay, I guess."

"You wanna talk about it?"

"Oh, why the hell not. C'mon and sit down before you fall down."

Danny stretched out on the couch, and Ward made tea for Danny, coffee for himself.

They hadn't talked about -- well, about a lot of things, but in particular, this. Fragments, here and there. But not all of it. Not most of it. 

Ward shoved the boat flotilla aside with his foot and sat on the floor, leaned his back against the couch with a cooling cup of coffee wrapped in his hands. And he told Danny, in bits and pieces, about things like ... slamming his hand in a car door for drugs. Trading Danny's life for a shot to stop the pain and the shakes and the hallucinations.

"I never knew for sure what made you do it," Danny murmured. "I mean, I figured you had a good reason ..."

Of course he had. Danny, who always saw the best in people. It had never even occurred to Ward that Danny actually never even knew the reasons, many and varied, why Ward had decided to sell him out to the Hand. Because Danny didn't push, usually; he just waited for Ward to volunteer information. And some things Ward really didn't want to be the one to bring up.

"Bakuto also said he'd help me get rid of Harold. Among other things. It was a multi-part deal."

"I'm just gonna say --"

"I know, I know. Making deals with the Hand is a terrible idea. Trust me, I figured that one out."

"Actually, I was going to say that Bakuto ended up getting the worse end of it. I mean, he's dead, and we're here."

"Huh," Ward said. It should have felt like a platitude, but somehow it didn't. He'd never really thought about it that way before, that he had lost every battle in that fight, but won the war in the end. Sort of.

"You know, I do remember a lot of what happened when I was a prisoner," Danny said. He looked half asleep, with his cheek resting on his fist. "I kept thinking they'd ask me questions, but they never did. They just shot me up with stuff and hit me when I had a problem with that." Some of what Ward was thinking must have showed on his face, because Danny added, "It wasn't _that_ bad. I've had worse."

"Not actually helping."

Danny narrowed his eyes at him. "You found me."

"Yeah, after a _week."_

Danny sat up abruptly and then swung down off the couch. It was unfair, Ward thought, that even in the state he was in, Danny still had that loose, casual grace. But hard on the heels of that thought came another, that maybe it was something Danny had worked his ass off for, not a boon he'd been granted by the universe.

Danny dropped into a sloppy lotus position next to Ward on the carpet. "Uh ... hi?" Ward said.

"Can I hug you?"

Well, that was new. As touchy-feely as Danny was in general, he'd never actually been that touchy-feely with Ward. And somehow it was like him, just ... so _him_ to ask first. "Okay," Ward said cautiously.

Needing no more encouragement than that, Danny fisted his hands in the back of Ward's shirt and buried his face in Ward's shoulder. Ward hesitantly hugged him back. Like saying _I love you,_ it was part of a language he'd lost long ago. 

It occurred to him that the last person in his life who'd hugged him, really hugged him, had been Joy -- over a year ago, before he'd chased her off for good. Maybe he could count Bethany, but theirs had been a different kind of embrace, a desperate mutual search for something they'd always managed to mistake for something else, until it had been too late.

He had no idea who was supposed to be getting comforted here, but he turned his face into Danny's sweat-damp, curly hair. The smell of Danny's hair was an oddly familiar smell, not entirely pleasant but not unpleasant, and he recognized it at last: it was the smell of Joy's hair when she was small and sick, when she used to cling to him for whatever comfort she thought she could get from her big brother at times like that.

He found himself rubbing his hand along Danny's spine, the way he used to with Joy, a long time ago. Danny drew a shuddering breath, and that was what made Ward think -- with the part of him that was sometimes able to step outside himself and not be a selfish dick about things like this -- that Danny's life had been almost as lacking in hugs of comfort as Ward's had, at least after a certain plane crash engineered by Ward's dad.

It shouldn't have made him laugh; it was only his fucked-up black sense of humor that made him laugh, but Danny felt the huff of it, felt his ribs expand and contract, and murmured, "What?" against his neck.

He couldn't think how to explain; he just said, "We're a fucking mess, aren't we?" into Danny's hair, and Danny laughed a little too, and hung on tighter.

After awhile, they untangled by unspoken agreement. Ward shoved Danny's shoulder lightly. "Think you can sleep now? Because I'm falling asleep where I sit." It was even, actually, true.

"Tell me a bedtime story," Danny said, with a grin that belied the shadows under his eyes, and this time Ward didn't bother to pull his punch. "Ow."

"I bare my soul and this is what I get. Didn't I just tell you bedtime stories?" He was trying not to grin, he didn't even _want_ to grin, but Danny grinned back and it was impossible not to return it.

"Terrible, depressing bedtime stories." Danny's eyes danced, and that was a look Ward hadn't seen in ... well, over a week, for sure. 

"What do you expect, the three little pigs?"

"That'd be a decent start."

"Bedtime stories were never promised," Ward said, and pushed him gently in the direction of the darkened second bedroom. Danny went with it, laughing a little, and collapsed onto the rucked-up covers when Ward gave him another shove.

"You're going to stay there, right?"

"But, bedtime stories!" Danny protested, and he was laughing in earnest now. Ward laughed and leaned on the doorframe and then he threw the nearest thing in reach, which was a towel. Danny caught it out of the air and fell back on the bed, still laughing.

"There is something _wrong_ with you," Ward said when he got his breath back, grinning, and Danny's smile flashed at him in the dark.

"Love you too, Ward," Danny called after him as Ward pulled the door not-quite-shut, enough for privacy but with just enough of a gap for peace of mind.

"Go to sleep!"

 

***

 

Ward was sacked out on the couch when the knock came on the door.

He was off the couch and halfway across the room with his gun in his hand before he figured out that it was the middle of the afternoon, and it was probably a maid. "Yeah?" he said, getting into a defensive stance behind the door.

"Ward?" Colleen's voice said.

Oh, thank _God._ He undid the chain and opened the door, realizing in the process that he was wearing sweatpants and hadn't shaved in days.

Colleen came in with Misty close behind her. She was in a hoodie, Misty in a leather jacket with a rucksack slung over one shoulder, both of them looking tired but not too tired to give him a shared look of amused skepticism.

"Danny's in that bedroom," Ward declared, pointing. Colleen brightened. "I'm ... going to make coffee, I guess."

"Gonna get dressed too?" Misty asked, to his back.

"I am dressed, thanks."

But he stopped into what was nominally his bedroom on the other side of the suite to leave the gun on the nightstand and grab a jacket to pull over the shitty tourist T-shirt from his days-ago shopping tour. When he came out, Misty was measuring out coffee. "You look like shit, Meachum," she said.

"Thanks. You too." He tried not to be too acutely aware that the suite looked like a frat house on the morning after a party, with pill bottles and empty takeout containers and random items of discarded clothing everywhere, and an entire trash basket of empty liquor bottles in the bathroom. If Colleen and Misty expected to be greeted by an immaculate hotel room, they could come back to help out rather than ninja-hunting in the Himalayas.

The door to the second bedroom was closed. He was vastly relieved that Danny _for the love of the proverbial Christ_ now had a support system who wasn't himself, and was, at the same time, profoundly annoyed with all three of them for no logical reason.

"Your creepy magic guns are on the coffee table," Misty said.

"Thanks." Ward glanced at the canvas-wrapped package. Danny would be glad to have those back; Ward would have been just as glad to have them fall off a cliff in the Himalayas. "You guys hunt a lot of Hand?"

"Oh, yeah," Misty said. "You all right? You look more jet-lagged than I feel. Unless I'm hallucinating the tiny little armada all over the place."

"I'm fine." Ward picked up a boat off the arm of the couch. "I was wondering how long it was going to take you to mention that."

"Is that origami?"

"He calls it zhezhi." He was probably saying that wrong. "But yeah. Basically."

Misty picked up a small boat with its cargo and turned it around. "What is this, a pineapple?"

"It's a sheep. Pineapples don't have legs."

"Neither does that."

"Sure it does. Right here." He reached out to pluck it from the boat and examined it. "Or maybe that's the head."

"I thought it was a stem."

They both examined the sheep with its glossy magazine-paper folds for much longer than Ward felt it deserved, which probably said a lot about both of their mental states right now, and then Ward flipped it over the back of the couch. "Screw it. I need to go get breakfast." He nodded toward the closed door to the other bedroom. "We can bring back something for them too."

"You know it's not breakfast if it's not morning, right?"

"I don't give a damn. I'm going to find a place that serves breakfast all day. I just have to get out of this hotel room before I lose my mind. Feel free to stay here or come with."

"Well, how could I turn down an invitation like that," Misty said, and grinned at him.

 

***

 

He and Misty got convenience-store takeout, and then wandered, while she gave him an abbreviated and unexpectedly funny account of their Hand-hunting sojourn in the Himalayas and occasionally texted Colleen to check in.

"So how safe are we, exactly?" Ward asked. Dusk purpled the sky as they bought two coffees from a small café to give them somewhere to sit down for a while. "Right now, I mean."

"It's a very safe city, Ward ..."

He scowled at her.

"Pretty safe, I think. Oh, there could be a few random elements hanging around, but in general they're not going to be causing problems for us anymore."

"A few random elements."

She shrugged. "Come on, Meachum, don't tell me you haven't noticed there are always a few random elements involved when you're spending time in the company of those two."

"I've noticed. Believe me, I've noticed."

Misty smiled and glanced down at her phone. "Speaking of random elements, look who's on their way to join us."

Colleen and Danny wandered into the café a few minutes later, hand in hand. As they sat down, Ward, by pure habit, gave Danny a quick, critical once-over: still kind of scruffy and thin, but less pallid than he'd looked in days. "You guys do the healing thing or what?"

"Is that a metaphor?" Danny asked, perfectly straight-faced and innocent. Ward kicked him under the table.

"I gave him a chi power-up," Colleen said, and laughed at the faces Ward and Misty both made. "You _asked."_

"I did ask. I did. I now regret asking."

It occurred to Ward, as he watched Colleen order one of nearly everything off the menu and Danny look vaguely interested in food for the first time in days, that it would have been awfully nice to have magic chi healing when _he_ went off drugs. On the other hand, if he hadn't been a complete dick to Danny back in those days, he might have had that too.

But in all likelihood, it wouldn't have helped much anyway. That was the epiphany that defused his incipient jealousy before it had a chance to put down roots. Colleen had eased Danny through the last of the withdrawals, but for Danny, there never had been an addiction, never had been a craving. 

There was no magic fix for what was wrong with Ward, not Bakuto's drug to cure the heroin craving, and not the Iron Fist. There was just getting through one day, and then another.

But he surprised himself with a realization: he _hadn't_ had a drink. Right now, he didn't even particularly want one. Misty ordered a beer off the drinks menu in the center table display, and Ward waved the menu on and stuck with coffee.

"So, you two headed back to the States right away?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Colleen said. "Look what happens when we leave _you_ two alone."

"Hey. That was all Danny."

This time it was Danny's turn to kick him, but it turned into a light tap of Danny's foot against the side of his. 

"And yet, you two somehow managed to avoid killing each other while trapped in a hotel room together," Misty remarked.

"Oh, we bonded," Ward said. "It was fun."

"Fun for you, maybe," Danny said, but he was grinning.

Misty looked thoughtful and then she reached across the table to tap Colleen's arm. "Hey, I'm gonna powder my nose before the drinks come. Come help me decipher the signage so I don't walk in on some unlucky dude."

"We were just at the --" Colleen began, then glanced at Danny. "Yeah, sure."

As the women left the table, Ward called at their backs, "Subtle, ladies! Very subtle!"

"So what exactly do they think we need to talk about?" Danny asked.

"It could be that they want to talk about us."

"That's not better."

"No. Not really."

Ward found himself suddenly in desperate need of something to do with his hands. This was one of the things he hated about not drinking. A glass of water in the hands didn't quite have the same cachet. He flattened out the drinks menu and started trying to remember the first folds for the sheep Danny had showed him how to make last night.

"No, across the top." Danny leaned over to press down the corner. "Ward ... I don't think I said this properly before, but thank you. Really. Thanks."

Ward glanced up and wished he hadn't, with Danny looking at him like that, warm and affectionate. "Well, you know, my schedule was pretty full, between Rand fundraisers and the jet set crowd, but I managed to pencil you in."

"Seriously, Ward, I know it wasn't easy for you, and -- you don't want to talk about this, do you?"

"What tipped you off?" Damn it, that leg fold wasn't right. "You know, Misty said my sheep looked like a pineapple."

"Well, she's not entirely wrong ..."

Ward glanced up to give him a narrow-eyed look. Danny was trying not to grin.

"That's what you call gratitude, is it."

"Sorry -- look --" Danny stole another drinks menu off the neighboring table. "Like you said, sheep are basically just blobs. Want me to show you how to fold a dragon?"

"Am I going to actually be able to fold this one, or is it just going to be you doing fifty million folds that defy the laws of physics?"

"No, Davos and I made this one up. It's easy."

"You and Davos," Ward said, and it occurred to him that as much of an open book as Danny was, he didn't talk about Davos much.

"Yeah," Danny said quietly. He laid out the menu between them. "Want to learn?"

"Sure," Ward sighed.

When the waitress came by with their drinks, Danny asked her to bring another handful of paper menus, and by the time Colleen and Misty came back, a small menagerie (mostly consisting of vaguely snakelike dragons) had begun to proliferate around, and occasionally on, the bottles and glasses and the plate of appetizers. 

"Colleen, do you want to make a dragon?" Danny asked, shoving a menu into her hands.

"I, uh --"

"I'll show you," Danny said, resting his chin on her shoulder. "Misty? How 'bout you?"

"Nope," Misty declared. "I'm not susceptible to peer pressure." She gave Ward a look as he very carefully and precisely folded his dragon's tail.

"Hey, if _I'm_ making them, you know they can't be that hard." And he set a dragon very neatly on the rim of her beer bottle, with the tail tucked down inside so it would perch up there.

**Author's Note:**

> Danny teaching Ward paper folding is [yutaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yutaya)'s idea, and a perfectly lovely idea it is.


End file.
